4 juillet

I can’t believe I had never seen this movie before. It’s great, and almost not dated at all. (Apart from the cast — I also can’t believe Jeff Goldblum was already acting when I was just two years old. He looks forty now!)

It’s a very simple game, and I’m not sure I’ll ever run it again (it gets hard), but considering the experience it creates with such elementary devices and the very small price at which it’s sold, the game is quite worth it.

6 juillet

On the opposite side of the spectrum from Capsule — though with an eerily similar premise — Stranded is a ripoff at any price, unless you’re looking for a diaporama of 8-bit animated gifs where the only gameplay, and I’m not exaggerating for effect, is waiting for the infuriatingly slow walking transition from one screen to the next.

9 juillet

I loved Telltale’s The Walking Dead. I really enjoyed the first decade of Fables. And that’s why I bought the whole season of The Wolf Among Us as soon as the first episode came out — I won’t do that mistake again. The first episode received some leniency because one assumed the story was going somewhere, but the season only got less and less interesting as it progressed. It sucked as a detective game. It sucked as an adventure game. It pretty much sucked as an interactive experience. And it wasn’t a very good or interesting Fables story either. The best thing about it is, it’s over.

But, hey, you should read Fables, it’s pretty fun. And if the game contributed to popularize the comic, good.

Thought it was a joke when I saw the title in a tweet, but it’s a real thing, and well written. Rather unnerving, until I went full-on hostile to regain some control over the situation — more like Teenage Simulator 2014, amirite.

11 juillet

We started on bad terms because my controller wasn’t operational and I found the game basically unplayable with keyboard and mouse. However, the gamepad control scheme is actually well designed and, once I got it working, the game suddenly became enjoyable.

Like all point-and-click adventure games, there are some puzzles I would never have had the patience to figure out without a walkthrough. And, as you can expect from a game that mixes point-and-click puzzles with shooting action, the combat is annoying and I’d love to be able to skip it. But the atmosphere, writing, and voice acting are all really pleasant and make up for the shortcomings.

Though probably not to the point that I’d buy the upcoming sequel — unless it finds the courage to do away with combat altogether.

Also, having some personal experience creating new development languages for the Objective-C platform, I’d like to suggest that the appropriate way to introduce a new language is for its creators to spend several months writing nontrivial applications in the language and reviewing the results with experts. This does not seem to have been done.

30 juillet

As someone who enjoys Hearthstone for the play-by-play tactics rather than the deck-building strategy, I’m not thrilled with wing 2 of the Naxxramas expansion, which just came out. I’m fine with the first boss punishing my hunter deck and forcing me to diversify a bit — but the last boss is basically a full-on deck-building puzzle, even in normal difficulty, and that’s much less interesting to me. I’m not just frustrated, but also worried about what it means for the upcoming wings… which I’ve all bought in advance. I figured Blizzard earned some money since I like the game so much, but I’m afraid it would have been much better spent on card packs.